Sarah Hepola is a friend, one of the early writers over at The Morning News, where they just did an interview with her. I haven’t seen her in years, but I always hoped she would write a book one day. Here it is! And it just made the New York Times Bestseller List. Fucking-a-right it did. Huge Congrats, Sepola. You moved all those bricks into a very pretty pile.

The best parts of Sarah Hepola’s Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget:

…if you’re like me, you know the thunderbolt of waking up to discover a blank space where pivotal scenes should be. My evenings come with trapdoors.

“I’m not angry,” I told her.
“Then what are you?” she asked.
I thought maybe I was bad.

Even my food co-op mother bought a book listing calorie counts, and I memorized those entries like Bible passages. I couldn’t tell you much about John 3:16, but I knew Blueberry Muffin: 426.

I’m not going to say I faked orgasms. That sounds intentional. As if I knew what an orgasm felt like, and I purposefully pretended to be having one. It was more like: Orgasms happen when you’re with men. You’re with a man now. Are you having an orgasm? Probably so! I learned in to these swells of pleasure with loud gasps and moans as if, by moving my arms and legs frantically enough, I might somehow learn to surf.

I knew online dating would come for me someday. It was the fate of all single women in their late 30s to stare down a personal profile, and as far as punishments go, this was fairly benign. Once, my type faced spinsterhood and destitution. Now I had to walk into the gallows of OK Cupid and drum up a good attitude about emoticons.

“You’re a contrarian,” I told him, licking grease off my fingers.
“Is that good?” he asked. “I want to be the thing that you like.”
And it was the first time someone had said this to me, but I recognized it as my driving motto for the past 25 years. It was nice to be on the other side for a change.

I liked talking about writing much more than actually writing, which is an unspeakably boring and laborious activity, like moving a pile of bricks fro one side of the room to the other.

…a glass of champagne, throwing its confetti in the air…

What mattered was that I was doing something I wanted to do instead of merely talking about it.

I wish belief didn’t feel like a choice between blind faith and blanket disavowal. I’m a little freaked out by the certainty on either side.

I finished a grownup book! As far as new-mom milestones go, I’ve decided this is more significant than fitting into my pre-baby jeans. Also, this only took me two and a half months. I’ll get back to you on the jeans.

The best parts of Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted:

“She had set aside the seductive familiarity of the celebrity fund-raiser.
The smell of jasmine.
The pool of blue jacaranda petals on the sidewalk where she sat.
The sense that under that tent nothing bad was going to happen and its corollary, the sense that under that tent nothing at all was going to happen.”

“If you knew [its] name, you might recall the days or nights spent on this island en route to or in lieu of more desirable islands, the metallic taste of tinned juice in rum punches, the mosquitoes under the net at night, the rented villa where the septic tank backed up, the unpleasantness over the Jet Ski misunderstanding, the hours spent waiting in the jammed airport when the scheduled Windward Air or BIWI flights failed to materialize, the piece of needlepoint you meant to finish and instead spotted with coconut oil, the book you meant to read and distractedly set aside, the tedium of all forlorn tropical places.”

“‘A lot of people get some big mystical kick out of chewing over things that happened forty, forty-five years ago,'” he said then. “‘Little sad stories about being misunderstood by their mother or getting snubbed at school or whatever. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, I’m not saying it’s self-indulgent or self-pitying or any other damn thing. I’m just saying I can’t afford it. So I don’t do it.'”

VOCAB

specific gravity – the ratio of the density of a substance to the density of a standard, usually water for a liquid or solid, and air for a gas.

Merck Manual – A health information reference.

proconsular – A provincial governor of consular rank in the Roman Republic and Roman Empire. 2. A high administrator in one of the modern colonial empires.

facile – appearing neat and comprehensive only by ignoring the true complexities of an issue; superficial.

Alcestis – a princess in Greek mythology, known for her love of her husband.

agitprop – political propaganda promulgated chiefly in literature, drama, music, or art